IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Obama 'finds the courage': orders federal government to increase use of renewable energy; Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) celebrates melting Arctic; ALEC and Koch Bros. launch an attack on solar; Solar panel maker takes on Germany's electric utilities; PLUS: The Heartland Institute is lying again, this time about the American Meteorological Society ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

The directive on renewable energy applies to all federal agencies, civilian and military. The Defense Department had previously set a goal that 25 percent of its energy needs should be supplied by renewable energy by 2025.

Toshiba, the Japanese electronics and engineering firm, announced plans today to bypass utilities and offer solar electricity directly to German apartment dwellers. The company calls it an "on-site consumption model" that will function outside Germany's feed-in tariff program.

A disturbing aspect of this e-mail is that it seems some effort was placed in making it appear to have been sent by AMS. It was sent from an e-mail account with AMS in the name (though not from the “ametsoc.org” domain) and featured the AMS logo prominently (used without permission from AMS).

The Elders, a group of eminent global leaders brought together by former South African president, Nelson Mandela, have told world leaders that nothing short of a decisive, ambitious, binding and effective deal would be expected from the meeting.

Climate deniers hate those pesky intrusions of reality. For Insurance giants like Munich Re, Swiss Re, and Lloyds of London, climate change is a reality that is showing up where it hurts most, on the ledgers. The long piece excerpted below is quite an extraordinary investigation for a mainstream publication, and deserves a look.

Tom Carnac, North American president of CDP, said that the five big oil companies seemed to have determined that a carbon price was an inevitable part of their financial future. “It’s climate change as a line item,” Mr. Carnac said. “They’re looking at it from a rational perspective, making a profit. It drives internal decision-making.”

Anthropogenic climate change will alter many physical and chemical characteristics that comprise the niches of marine species and ecosystem habitats. Changes in these physico-chemical conditions are already leading to shifts in the habitat ranges of some marine species, and extinction rates of marine species are expected to increase.

They simulated a planet in which greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise... [A]fter an initial period in which temperatures started to drop, something else happened. The simulated planet started to warm again, and go on warming for another 400 years or more.